Select MasterCard Payment and Data Services Will be Released via Open API to Worldwide Software Developer Community to Create New, Innovative Payment Applications
Purchase, NY, May 25, 2010 - MasterCard Worldwide announced that later this year it will release Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs) for third–party and independent software developers around the world. By opening up previously proprietary payments and data services, developers will be able to create a new wave of e-commerce and mobile payment applications.
The new Open API program is the first initiative from the newly created MasterCard Labs. A new developer portal will also be launched to enable developers to easily sign up for access to all of the Open APIs that MasterCard makes available will also be launched.
Through the portal, MasterCard will provide developers with technical documentation, software development kits (SDKs), sample source code, reference guides, and “virtual sandboxes” for testing new and innovative applications. A developer forum designed to spur collaboration between MasterCard engineers and developers will also be an integral component of the new portal.
“We are excited about tapping into the ingenuity of software developers around the globe to help create the next generation of game-changing payment applications,” said Josh Peirez, Chief Innovation Officer, MasterCard Worldwide. “We feel this will unleash innovation within our industry especially in the burgeoning areas of e-commerce and mobile payments.”
In addition to payments, MasterCard has identified approximately 20 platforms and services that it plans to open up to developers via the portal. These platforms and services provide additional functionality and enhancements to MasterCard’s payment capabilities. The Open APIs will further enhance the development of new applications and systems beyond those currently available, including CRMs, ERPs, online games, merchant e-commerce web sites, eWallets, mobile applications, and payroll systems.
MasterCard payment and data services also could be integrated with other data sources and functions to create “mashups” – new applications that are a result of combining multiple data sources.
“Over the past few years, we have used some of our Open APIs internally to create groundbreaking new iPhone applications, such as MasterCard ATM Hunter and MasterCard Easy Savings,” said Garry Lyons, Group Executive, Research and Development, MasterCard Worldwide. “Opening these and other APIs to the global development community developers will provide developers the opportunity to leverage MasterCard’s leading payment platforms and come up with new ideas that may not have been previously considered or thought possible.”
“In addition, our new Open API program and developer portal will strengthen MasterCard’s position as an industry leader in innovation and give us an even greater competitive advantage as the payments industry continues to evolve,” said Lyons.
Interested developers should contact MasterCard at api@mastercard.com in order to learn more on how to participate in the program. By virtue of the guidelines applicable to the program, all developers will be approved and registered by MasterCard to ensure that MasterCard payment and data services continue to be used appropriately and productively.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Thai, Argentine Textile Workers Unite Against Slave Labour
By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 23, 2010 (IPS) - Textile cooperatives founded by former slave labourers from Argentina and Thailand will jointly launch a new brand of clothing in June to raise awareness about exploitation and promote decent jobs in the garment industry.
On Jun. 4, La Alameda from Argentina and Dignity Returns from Thailand will start selling thousands of T-shirts bearing several different designs under the "No Chains" trademark. They ultimately plan to produce additional clothing items in association with other cooperatives.
"It's a cry of support for decent work and a way to prove that high quality clothing can be produced without having to enslave workers," one of the initiative's promoters, Gustavo Vera of La Alameda, told IPS.
La Alameda first emerged as a community kitchen in 2001, during Argentina's severe economic crisis. It served many undocumented Bolivian workers who had escaped the garment industry sweatshops that had mushroomed in Buenos Aires.
La Alameda's repeated complaints about the dismal working conditions, in addition to a tragic accident at one of the sweatshops in which six people died -- five of them children --, finally focussed public attention on slave labour, which in Argentina largely involves undocumented immigrants.
The workers spend long days toiling without rest, crowded into spaces where they also live with their families. They lack documents and money, and have little freedom to venture outside the premises.
The clandestine factories provide products for major clothing brands, like Puma, Bensimon, Lecoq, Soho and Kosiuko, according to the complaints that former workers filed in the courts. Justice authorities have seized the machinery from some of the workshops, but have yet to sentence those responsible.
Some of the workers joined together to set up a textile cooperative that sells its own brand, Mundo Alameda, and has the backing of the non-governmental AVINA Foundation.
Meanwhile, halfway across the world in Thailand, a group of women laid off without compensation by the Bed and Bath company when their factory shut down founded the Solidarity Factory cooperative, which later became Dignity Returns.
The members of Dignity Returns say that the factory made clothing for brands including Nike, Gap and Reebok, and that they were forced to work extremely long hours. To add insult to injury, their wages were docked if they complained about fatigue.
The two groups, who met in 2009 at an international conference hosted by the Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Centre, resolved to join forces to make their voices heard around the globe.
The new clothing brand will be launched simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Bangkok.
On the No Chains website, their position is clear: "The clothes produced in typical garment factories trap workers in chains -- in chains of debt, chains of control by bosses who care about money and not workers -- chains of global production, where many parties grab profits that come from the blood of the workers."
That is why it is not just about launching a brand or a new self-managed venture, but also about calling attention to the need for industrial production that respects the dignity of workers, without exploitation or slavery, according to the promoters.
"Through purposeful action we are denouncing the persistence of slave labour, which has global markets and which leads major brands to take advantage of vulnerable groups and of lax legislation in order to impose forced labour in various parts of the world," Vera said.
The cooperatives held an international contest for T-shirt designs, and of the six winning motifs, two came from Argentina, and one each from Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea and the United States.
The cooperatives began production in time to meet the launch date, and the idea is to distribute the clothing by consignment through various non-governmental organisations and trade unions.
The next goal, said Vera, is to expand the network to include cooperatives and society at large in the anti-slave labour campaign. There are talks under way to incorporate two more cooperatives, from the Philippines and Indonesia.
"Within a few years we want to have 20 to 30 cooperatives from different countries in the developing world," he said. There are also plans to diversify the brand to other types of garments.
According to the organisers, the project is not without precedent. The "Clean Clothes Campaign," led by consumer organisations, promotes sales of clothing that is not produced by slave labour.
But No Chains is the first led by independent cooperatives: "This is the first time that workers coming from the world of slavery are coming together to denounce exploitation and prove that it's possible to produce clothing under decent working conditions," said Vera.
BUENOS AIRES, May 23, 2010 (IPS) - Textile cooperatives founded by former slave labourers from Argentina and Thailand will jointly launch a new brand of clothing in June to raise awareness about exploitation and promote decent jobs in the garment industry.
On Jun. 4, La Alameda from Argentina and Dignity Returns from Thailand will start selling thousands of T-shirts bearing several different designs under the "No Chains" trademark. They ultimately plan to produce additional clothing items in association with other cooperatives.
"It's a cry of support for decent work and a way to prove that high quality clothing can be produced without having to enslave workers," one of the initiative's promoters, Gustavo Vera of La Alameda, told IPS.
La Alameda first emerged as a community kitchen in 2001, during Argentina's severe economic crisis. It served many undocumented Bolivian workers who had escaped the garment industry sweatshops that had mushroomed in Buenos Aires.
La Alameda's repeated complaints about the dismal working conditions, in addition to a tragic accident at one of the sweatshops in which six people died -- five of them children --, finally focussed public attention on slave labour, which in Argentina largely involves undocumented immigrants.
The workers spend long days toiling without rest, crowded into spaces where they also live with their families. They lack documents and money, and have little freedom to venture outside the premises.
The clandestine factories provide products for major clothing brands, like Puma, Bensimon, Lecoq, Soho and Kosiuko, according to the complaints that former workers filed in the courts. Justice authorities have seized the machinery from some of the workshops, but have yet to sentence those responsible.
Some of the workers joined together to set up a textile cooperative that sells its own brand, Mundo Alameda, and has the backing of the non-governmental AVINA Foundation.
Meanwhile, halfway across the world in Thailand, a group of women laid off without compensation by the Bed and Bath company when their factory shut down founded the Solidarity Factory cooperative, which later became Dignity Returns.
The members of Dignity Returns say that the factory made clothing for brands including Nike, Gap and Reebok, and that they were forced to work extremely long hours. To add insult to injury, their wages were docked if they complained about fatigue.
The two groups, who met in 2009 at an international conference hosted by the Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Centre, resolved to join forces to make their voices heard around the globe.
The new clothing brand will be launched simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Bangkok.
On the No Chains website, their position is clear: "The clothes produced in typical garment factories trap workers in chains -- in chains of debt, chains of control by bosses who care about money and not workers -- chains of global production, where many parties grab profits that come from the blood of the workers."
That is why it is not just about launching a brand or a new self-managed venture, but also about calling attention to the need for industrial production that respects the dignity of workers, without exploitation or slavery, according to the promoters.
"Through purposeful action we are denouncing the persistence of slave labour, which has global markets and which leads major brands to take advantage of vulnerable groups and of lax legislation in order to impose forced labour in various parts of the world," Vera said.
The cooperatives held an international contest for T-shirt designs, and of the six winning motifs, two came from Argentina, and one each from Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea and the United States.
The cooperatives began production in time to meet the launch date, and the idea is to distribute the clothing by consignment through various non-governmental organisations and trade unions.
The next goal, said Vera, is to expand the network to include cooperatives and society at large in the anti-slave labour campaign. There are talks under way to incorporate two more cooperatives, from the Philippines and Indonesia.
"Within a few years we want to have 20 to 30 cooperatives from different countries in the developing world," he said. There are also plans to diversify the brand to other types of garments.
According to the organisers, the project is not without precedent. The "Clean Clothes Campaign," led by consumer organisations, promotes sales of clothing that is not produced by slave labour.
But No Chains is the first led by independent cooperatives: "This is the first time that workers coming from the world of slavery are coming together to denounce exploitation and prove that it's possible to produce clothing under decent working conditions," said Vera.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Urban Farms vs. Urban Zoning
Editor's Note: Why I am posting an article about urban zoning in a blog about alternative, local economics and currencies? Because this is a good case study of how politics and economic paradigms have to shift to support the transition to a sustainable local economy. I don't think we have any choice with peak oil and the problems with the global economy. These ridiculous laws about restricting small business need to change. People need to be able to grow large amounts of food in the City. People need to be able to provide services and even sell goods out of their homes in order to relocalize. Laws are skewed to benefit large, profit oriented businesses that can undertake these financial and legal hurdles. Import replacement will happen too slowly in my opinion to save us if City governments don't start getting out the way and instead start helping.
from Terrain Magazine
By Casey Miner
Terraced into the uphill slope of a backyard in a quiet neighborhood in North Berkeley, Sophie Hahn’s vegetable garden looks like many others in the city: planter boxes bursting with kale, lettuce, and cauliflower, a compost bin for green waste, chickens clucking in their coop. The garden produces eight garden beds worth of veggies and sixteen chickens’ worth of eggs—much more food than Hahn’s family could possibly eat.
The oversupply is intentional: while the yard belongs to Hahn, she does no gardening herself. Instead, she hires two professional urban farmers to plant, weed, harvest, and deliver the bounty to her family’s doorstep—and to her neighbors’ doorsteps—once a week. “I don’t even go down there,” the attorney and community activist said one morning last fall. “I’m busy!”
To Hahn, this arrangement makes perfect sense. Instead of hiring a gardener to tend her roses, she hires a farmer to tend her vegetables, thus putting her land to productive use. “If I turn my backyard into edible food plants, that means five or six other families don’t have to,” she says, as the chickens, which produce four to five dozen eggs each week, cluck in apparent agreement. “I spread the benefits to more than just my family.”
But feeding six families costs money, and Hahn has shouldered the set-up costs alone, installing garden beds and drip irrigation, buying seeds, and paying the farmers to coax the land to produce. To recoup those costs, Hahn wants to charge her neighbors a small fee for their weekly food baskets. This exchange, she says, would be similar to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which people pay a subscription fee to a farm in return for regular deliveries of seasonal food. Since she lives in Berkeley, a city that just last year made building a local food system part of its long-term Climate Action Plan, Hahn figured she would have no problem getting a license from the city to run her small farm.
She was wrong. In fact, the process of getting a license turned out to be so convoluted, and so expensive, that for now she’s given up trying to do it. At a time when it seems everyone wants to bring the farm back to the city, and urban food projects are all the rage, Hahn’s story is a study in just how great a challenge this can be. Her adversary is not an anti-vegetable city official or a NIMBY neighbor—all that’s stopping Hahn is a few bland paragraphs in the zoning code.
Hahn’s backyard farm project started when she moved into her house in late 2006. At that time, she recalls, there was nothing at all in the yard—the previous occupants had laid down a layer of sod, which died soon after Hahn moved in, leaving the yard, she says, “ugly and useless.” Not much of a gardener herself, Hahn didn’t think about what to do with the space until more than a year later, when a flier in the neighborhood caught her eye: A woman named Willow proposed to set up a backyard garden in exchange for room and board. While she thought the flier “lovely,” Hahn was initially skeptical. “Seriously … Willow?” she recalls, rolling her eyes in a just-another-Berkeley-hippie sort of way.
But one phone call changed her mind. Willow Rosenthal was the founder of West Oakland’s food security project City Slicker Farms and about as far from a dreamy hippie as raspberries are from ramen. When she looked at Hahn’s yard, she saw potential. A veteran urban farmer, Rosenthal plans intensive gardens—so intensive, she says, that she only reluctantly concedes space for a picnic table. Hahn’s forty-by-sixty-foot backyard area, Rosenthal thought, could easily feed five or six families. The two hatched the idea to create a neighborhood-scale CSA, with Hahn lending land that would otherwise go unused to two farmers—in this case, Rosenthal and her assistant Laurel Sharp—who would manage its daily operation.
The problem is that Berkeley’s zoning code says nothing about a neighborhood CSA, and its absence is significant. Technically, such an operation would be considered a business, since money changes hands. But Hahn’s North Berkeley neighborhood is strictly residential. Its zoning code allows people to run small, low– or moderate-impact in-home businesses but mandates that all activity take place indoors. It also forbids “customer visits,” “handling or transport of goods or products” on-site, and “offensive or objectionable noise, vibration, odors, heat, dirt, or electrical disturbance perceptible by the average person.” An outdoor operation that uses a pickup truck and a compost pile, and would require customers to pick up vegetables, is not allowable under the code.
Hahn and Rosenthal discovered all this when they called the city’s health and planning departments to see what would be required to get a business license. While all the city officials they talked to said they supported the project in theory, they said that legally, there was no way to make it work. One official, says Hahn, described the farm as a “high-impact home occupation.” If Hahn and Rosenthal wanted to go ahead with the project, they were told, they would need a special exemption, which would require a public hearing, six to eight months of waiting, and close to $4,000 in fees. After months of haggling, they pulled their application last summer and decided to regroup the following season. “We didn’t think it was going to be so complicated,” says Hahn.
Berkeley city planning director Debbie Sanderson agrees that while a backyard CSA sounds like a good idea, as the laws are currently written it is unquestionably illegal. While the city could change its code, either under the direction of the city council or in response to a citizen petition, the process
is lengthy and complex. The most recent change, which created a provision allowing in-home teaching, took nearly a year to implement, Sanderson says. Still, she says, the code is a living document: “Life in the world is always changing, so the code has to change too.” Indeed, the question of how to integrate agriculture into urban landscapes has started to pop up in American Planning Association journal articles in recent months—one article analyzed the cities of Portland and Vancouver—but it hasn’t come up in Berkeley until now.
Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)
“The bottom line is that the code didn’t contemplate this,” says Hahn. “It anticipates piano lessons, college counseling, therapy.” In other words, quiet in-home businesses. This makes sense to her. “I don’t want, say, a car repair shop in the yard,” she says. “But edibles grow as quietly as flowers.”
Hahn is not the first would-be backyard farmer to encounter this set of problems. In an era of E. coli outbreaks, high food prices, and a torrent of food industry exposés, the push for locally-produced food has taken off in cities nationwide. But in many cases it has run straight into a regulatory wall. Most zoning codes, like Berkeley’s, are written to maintain separation between commercial and residential areas, and almost none address food production. Add the challenges of potentially contaminated soil, limited water, and neighbors unhappy about the smell of compost, and any project more ambitious than a hobby garden can seem daunting. Still, the small scale of what Hahn is proposing makes it possible to resolve these issues. None of her neighbors has ever complained about the farm, she says, and if anyone did have problem, it would be easy for that person to come talk to her because they’re neighbors. (That said, Hahn notes that changing the code would make it harder for one disgruntled person to sabotage an otherwise popular project.)
Farmers across the country have found individual workarounds. In Flint, Michigan, a collaborative of urban gardeners is working with the city to rewrite outdated codes with an eye towards local food production. In Detroit, which has a large percentage of vacant land within city limits, high– and low-tech urban agriculture is one solution to the search for a new industry. Entrepreneurs and do-it-yourself homeowners are flocking to the city, and a number of proposals to rezone certain neighborhoods and authorize farm projects are currently before the city government. (The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network says 900 farms already exist within city limits; meanwhile, an entrepreneur and money manager named John Hantz is offering to put up $30 million to convert large plots of city land to a conventional farm.) In Buffalo, New York, a couple last year reached an agreement with the city to lease 27 acres of vacant land for farming, provided they sell the food locally, and with the understanding that the city may still develop the space in the future. And in Sacramento, the city government amended its codes in 2007 to allow front-yard vegetable gardens, which it had previously forbidden as unsightly.
With the possible exception of Detroit, these are piecemeal solutions to what many people believe is a much bigger problem. Cities might be able to produce enough food to feed their residents, but to do it they need to rethink the way they use space, and that includes changing zoning laws to allow for small-scale businesses like Hahn’s. Berkeley has written goals for local food production into its long-term Climate Action Plan, including commitments to “encourage… buildings to incorporate rooftop gardens that can be used for food production,” “encourage residents to grow food in home and community gardens,” and “support local efforts to provide training to residents in farming and gardening techniques.” Right now, though, they’re just goals.
For now, Hahn and Rosenthal are giving their produce away to neighbors, but as the farm heads into its first full season, they’re again looking at ways to change the law. Though the concerns someone might have about a farm—“yucky smells and loud noises,” says Rosenthal—seem not to apply to Hahn’s farm, both she and Rosenthal say that zoning changes must take neighbor’s comfort levels into account. Still, they say, those changes can be consistent with levels of nuisance and noise that people already take for granted. “People are allowed to have dogs, and dogs are noisy,” says Rosenthal. “Construction workers and landscape workers can start making noise at 7 am.”
“I think it will take time for people to change their way of thinking about this,” says Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, who has spoken with Hahn about drafting legislation that would change the city’s code to encourage small-scale farms like the one she proposes. “We’re trying to achieve more sustainability,” he says, “but it takes a while for our law to change to catch up.”
Why go to all this trouble in the first place? Hahn lives in a foodie Mecca, replete with farmers’ markets and local produce at every grocery store. But for Hahn, even local food isn’t local enough. For example, she points out, “local” food often comes from the Central Valley. “If I can grow it in my own backyard, why would I get it from Salinas?” she asks. She wants to do everything she can, she says, to reduce her “food-miles”—the distance food travels from farm to plate—to zero.
The idea of food that’s “more local than local” has a certain appeal for some, though they can’t always put their fingers on exactly what that appeal is. “When I get the veggies, they have just been picked,” says Austene Hall, who lives down the hill from Hahn and has been getting vegetables from her for a number of months. After a pause, she adds, “I really like having it right next door. Willow and I chat over the wall; I hear all about what they’re planting and why.”
Hall also likes that she can eat vegetables that may as well have been grown in her own backyard, without actually having to grow them. Though she’s vegetarian and describes herself as an avid gardener, she prefers flowers to food and has no interest in trying to meet her own vegetable needs. To Hahn, that’s the reason the model she’s proposing is so crucial. Growing food requires time, resources, and skills that most urban dwellers don’t have and aren’t willing to acquire. “If you want to reduce the total amount of food trucked and shipped, you need a model where a paid professional
is doing it,” she says.
Rosenthal agrees. “We don’t think everyone should sew their own clothes. Why should everyone grow their own food? It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “There’s a huge number of people interested in using their yards to produce food for their families, but because of life circumstances they will never put time into actually growing it. They are in an economic bracket where they want to hire someone to do that for them, just as they would hire a landscaper to maintain their nonedible landscape. If we ignore these people, we ignore a vast productive capacity within the community.”
Despite the challenges, says Rosenthal, people’s growing interest in the origins and sustainability of their food means that the time is right for cities to take on these issues. “People are starting to ask, ‘How do we want to use our collective resources?’” she says. “I have complete faith that these things will change.”
from Terrain Magazine
By Casey Miner
Terraced into the uphill slope of a backyard in a quiet neighborhood in North Berkeley, Sophie Hahn’s vegetable garden looks like many others in the city: planter boxes bursting with kale, lettuce, and cauliflower, a compost bin for green waste, chickens clucking in their coop. The garden produces eight garden beds worth of veggies and sixteen chickens’ worth of eggs—much more food than Hahn’s family could possibly eat.
The oversupply is intentional: while the yard belongs to Hahn, she does no gardening herself. Instead, she hires two professional urban farmers to plant, weed, harvest, and deliver the bounty to her family’s doorstep—and to her neighbors’ doorsteps—once a week. “I don’t even go down there,” the attorney and community activist said one morning last fall. “I’m busy!”
To Hahn, this arrangement makes perfect sense. Instead of hiring a gardener to tend her roses, she hires a farmer to tend her vegetables, thus putting her land to productive use. “If I turn my backyard into edible food plants, that means five or six other families don’t have to,” she says, as the chickens, which produce four to five dozen eggs each week, cluck in apparent agreement. “I spread the benefits to more than just my family.”
But feeding six families costs money, and Hahn has shouldered the set-up costs alone, installing garden beds and drip irrigation, buying seeds, and paying the farmers to coax the land to produce. To recoup those costs, Hahn wants to charge her neighbors a small fee for their weekly food baskets. This exchange, she says, would be similar to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which people pay a subscription fee to a farm in return for regular deliveries of seasonal food. Since she lives in Berkeley, a city that just last year made building a local food system part of its long-term Climate Action Plan, Hahn figured she would have no problem getting a license from the city to run her small farm.
She was wrong. In fact, the process of getting a license turned out to be so convoluted, and so expensive, that for now she’s given up trying to do it. At a time when it seems everyone wants to bring the farm back to the city, and urban food projects are all the rage, Hahn’s story is a study in just how great a challenge this can be. Her adversary is not an anti-vegetable city official or a NIMBY neighbor—all that’s stopping Hahn is a few bland paragraphs in the zoning code.
Hahn’s backyard farm project started when she moved into her house in late 2006. At that time, she recalls, there was nothing at all in the yard—the previous occupants had laid down a layer of sod, which died soon after Hahn moved in, leaving the yard, she says, “ugly and useless.” Not much of a gardener herself, Hahn didn’t think about what to do with the space until more than a year later, when a flier in the neighborhood caught her eye: A woman named Willow proposed to set up a backyard garden in exchange for room and board. While she thought the flier “lovely,” Hahn was initially skeptical. “Seriously … Willow?” she recalls, rolling her eyes in a just-another-Berkeley-hippie sort of way.
But one phone call changed her mind. Willow Rosenthal was the founder of West Oakland’s food security project City Slicker Farms and about as far from a dreamy hippie as raspberries are from ramen. When she looked at Hahn’s yard, she saw potential. A veteran urban farmer, Rosenthal plans intensive gardens—so intensive, she says, that she only reluctantly concedes space for a picnic table. Hahn’s forty-by-sixty-foot backyard area, Rosenthal thought, could easily feed five or six families. The two hatched the idea to create a neighborhood-scale CSA, with Hahn lending land that would otherwise go unused to two farmers—in this case, Rosenthal and her assistant Laurel Sharp—who would manage its daily operation.
The problem is that Berkeley’s zoning code says nothing about a neighborhood CSA, and its absence is significant. Technically, such an operation would be considered a business, since money changes hands. But Hahn’s North Berkeley neighborhood is strictly residential. Its zoning code allows people to run small, low– or moderate-impact in-home businesses but mandates that all activity take place indoors. It also forbids “customer visits,” “handling or transport of goods or products” on-site, and “offensive or objectionable noise, vibration, odors, heat, dirt, or electrical disturbance perceptible by the average person.” An outdoor operation that uses a pickup truck and a compost pile, and would require customers to pick up vegetables, is not allowable under the code.
Hahn and Rosenthal discovered all this when they called the city’s health and planning departments to see what would be required to get a business license. While all the city officials they talked to said they supported the project in theory, they said that legally, there was no way to make it work. One official, says Hahn, described the farm as a “high-impact home occupation.” If Hahn and Rosenthal wanted to go ahead with the project, they were told, they would need a special exemption, which would require a public hearing, six to eight months of waiting, and close to $4,000 in fees. After months of haggling, they pulled their application last summer and decided to regroup the following season. “We didn’t think it was going to be so complicated,” says Hahn.
Berkeley city planning director Debbie Sanderson agrees that while a backyard CSA sounds like a good idea, as the laws are currently written it is unquestionably illegal. While the city could change its code, either under the direction of the city council or in response to a citizen petition, the process
is lengthy and complex. The most recent change, which created a provision allowing in-home teaching, took nearly a year to implement, Sanderson says. Still, she says, the code is a living document: “Life in the world is always changing, so the code has to change too.” Indeed, the question of how to integrate agriculture into urban landscapes has started to pop up in American Planning Association journal articles in recent months—one article analyzed the cities of Portland and Vancouver—but it hasn’t come up in Berkeley until now.
Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)
“The bottom line is that the code didn’t contemplate this,” says Hahn. “It anticipates piano lessons, college counseling, therapy.” In other words, quiet in-home businesses. This makes sense to her. “I don’t want, say, a car repair shop in the yard,” she says. “But edibles grow as quietly as flowers.”
Hahn is not the first would-be backyard farmer to encounter this set of problems. In an era of E. coli outbreaks, high food prices, and a torrent of food industry exposés, the push for locally-produced food has taken off in cities nationwide. But in many cases it has run straight into a regulatory wall. Most zoning codes, like Berkeley’s, are written to maintain separation between commercial and residential areas, and almost none address food production. Add the challenges of potentially contaminated soil, limited water, and neighbors unhappy about the smell of compost, and any project more ambitious than a hobby garden can seem daunting. Still, the small scale of what Hahn is proposing makes it possible to resolve these issues. None of her neighbors has ever complained about the farm, she says, and if anyone did have problem, it would be easy for that person to come talk to her because they’re neighbors. (That said, Hahn notes that changing the code would make it harder for one disgruntled person to sabotage an otherwise popular project.)
Farmers across the country have found individual workarounds. In Flint, Michigan, a collaborative of urban gardeners is working with the city to rewrite outdated codes with an eye towards local food production. In Detroit, which has a large percentage of vacant land within city limits, high– and low-tech urban agriculture is one solution to the search for a new industry. Entrepreneurs and do-it-yourself homeowners are flocking to the city, and a number of proposals to rezone certain neighborhoods and authorize farm projects are currently before the city government. (The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network says 900 farms already exist within city limits; meanwhile, an entrepreneur and money manager named John Hantz is offering to put up $30 million to convert large plots of city land to a conventional farm.) In Buffalo, New York, a couple last year reached an agreement with the city to lease 27 acres of vacant land for farming, provided they sell the food locally, and with the understanding that the city may still develop the space in the future. And in Sacramento, the city government amended its codes in 2007 to allow front-yard vegetable gardens, which it had previously forbidden as unsightly.
With the possible exception of Detroit, these are piecemeal solutions to what many people believe is a much bigger problem. Cities might be able to produce enough food to feed their residents, but to do it they need to rethink the way they use space, and that includes changing zoning laws to allow for small-scale businesses like Hahn’s. Berkeley has written goals for local food production into its long-term Climate Action Plan, including commitments to “encourage… buildings to incorporate rooftop gardens that can be used for food production,” “encourage residents to grow food in home and community gardens,” and “support local efforts to provide training to residents in farming and gardening techniques.” Right now, though, they’re just goals.
For now, Hahn and Rosenthal are giving their produce away to neighbors, but as the farm heads into its first full season, they’re again looking at ways to change the law. Though the concerns someone might have about a farm—“yucky smells and loud noises,” says Rosenthal—seem not to apply to Hahn’s farm, both she and Rosenthal say that zoning changes must take neighbor’s comfort levels into account. Still, they say, those changes can be consistent with levels of nuisance and noise that people already take for granted. “People are allowed to have dogs, and dogs are noisy,” says Rosenthal. “Construction workers and landscape workers can start making noise at 7 am.”
“I think it will take time for people to change their way of thinking about this,” says Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, who has spoken with Hahn about drafting legislation that would change the city’s code to encourage small-scale farms like the one she proposes. “We’re trying to achieve more sustainability,” he says, “but it takes a while for our law to change to catch up.”
Why go to all this trouble in the first place? Hahn lives in a foodie Mecca, replete with farmers’ markets and local produce at every grocery store. But for Hahn, even local food isn’t local enough. For example, she points out, “local” food often comes from the Central Valley. “If I can grow it in my own backyard, why would I get it from Salinas?” she asks. She wants to do everything she can, she says, to reduce her “food-miles”—the distance food travels from farm to plate—to zero.
The idea of food that’s “more local than local” has a certain appeal for some, though they can’t always put their fingers on exactly what that appeal is. “When I get the veggies, they have just been picked,” says Austene Hall, who lives down the hill from Hahn and has been getting vegetables from her for a number of months. After a pause, she adds, “I really like having it right next door. Willow and I chat over the wall; I hear all about what they’re planting and why.”
Hall also likes that she can eat vegetables that may as well have been grown in her own backyard, without actually having to grow them. Though she’s vegetarian and describes herself as an avid gardener, she prefers flowers to food and has no interest in trying to meet her own vegetable needs. To Hahn, that’s the reason the model she’s proposing is so crucial. Growing food requires time, resources, and skills that most urban dwellers don’t have and aren’t willing to acquire. “If you want to reduce the total amount of food trucked and shipped, you need a model where a paid professional
is doing it,” she says.
Rosenthal agrees. “We don’t think everyone should sew their own clothes. Why should everyone grow their own food? It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “There’s a huge number of people interested in using their yards to produce food for their families, but because of life circumstances they will never put time into actually growing it. They are in an economic bracket where they want to hire someone to do that for them, just as they would hire a landscaper to maintain their nonedible landscape. If we ignore these people, we ignore a vast productive capacity within the community.”
Despite the challenges, says Rosenthal, people’s growing interest in the origins and sustainability of their food means that the time is right for cities to take on these issues. “People are starting to ask, ‘How do we want to use our collective resources?’” she says. “I have complete faith that these things will change.”
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Investing in Local Business...Legally
How to Raise Money But Not Break the Bank
State and federal laws restrict your ability to secure capital. But with imagination, there are ways to do it without spending all your money on experts.
from East Bay Express
By Jenny Kassan
So you're trying to raise money for your business. But banks aren't lending, your savings are inadequate, and borrowing against the credit card isn't optimal. So you decide to raise money from your customers and put a sign in your window inviting people to invest in your business. Congratulations — you have just violated securities law and could face severe penalties.
Raising money from investors can be a great way to create or expand a business. Unlike lenders, investors typically forgo regular payments of interest and principal in exchange for the possibility of a bigger return down the road. But there is a huge barrier to raising capital from investors: securities law.
The regulations governing securities are little understood by most business owners. In my practice, I have seen small business owners who have no idea that their efforts to raise capital violate state and federal securities law.
It's helpful to recall why securities laws were passed. One big cause of the 1929 stock-market crash was the lack of regulation of securities markets. Any charlatan could print stock certificates promising huge returns to investors who had little recourse when the certificates turned out to be worthless. In response, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933. This act, along with state securities laws, is designed to protect unsophisticated investors from losing their life savings in speculative investments.
The basic requirement is that a security cannot be sold unless it is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and regulators in any state where investors reside. Registration requires extensive disclosures and compliance with numerous technical rules. This is what is commonly known as going public, a process that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal, accounting, and other fees and costs. There are some exceptions to the requirement, but even those can involve complicated compliance work and thousands of dollars in legal fees and other costs.
Many people assume that these requirements apply only when selling stock, but this is not the case. A security is any instrument such as a stock, bond, note, or contract that is purchased by someone who is expecting to receive profits generated by the efforts of others. Even if someone lends you money for your business and you promise an interest payment, that transaction can be covered by securities regulations. In fact, the rules apply not just to the sale but to the offering of a security, so even putting up a sign advertising a chance to invest in your business violates the law.
This is very frustrating, not only for business owners but also for people who would love to invest in their local economy. Because of these laws, even if I wanted to invest in a wonderful and hugely profitable business next door, I couldn't do it unless the business spent thousands of dollars for legal compliance. Unless I am a so-called "accredited investor," with a net worth of at least $1 million or a personal income exceeding $200,000, my only option is to invest in companies that have gone public. These companies are primarily giant multinational corporations whose practices I might not support and which contribute very little to my community.
So what is a small business owner to do? Here are some ways to raise funds that do not require extensive securities-compliance work.
Form a cooperative. In California, there is an exemption from securities regulations for investments of up to $300 by members of a cooperative. Cooperatives are businesses formed under a cooperative statute in which the members each have one vote. The members can be employees, customers, or business owners who join together to market their products or services. As long as the cooperative and all of its members are based in California, and the co-op transacts most of its business in California, it also is exempt from federal securities law.
Get donations. A security creates an expectation that the investor will receive a return. If someone gives you money with no expectation of a return, that is not a security and isn't subject to securities regulations. Many entrepreneurs are using so-called crowdfunding web sites such as ChipIn.com and MicroPledge.com to raise money for various causes. Donations of this type are not tax deductible, but lots of people might be willing to chip in to support a great local business.
Sell memberships. If someone gives you money in exchange for something of value, that is not considered a security. An interesting example of this strategy can be found at BeerBankroll.com. This crowdfunding platform is selling $50 memberships to open a brewpub. Membership confers a T-shirt, a chance to win prizes, and the opportunity to participate in a community-managed brewpub. If you can provide a membership package that people are willing to pay for, this can be a great way to raise money without selling securities.
Pre-sell a product. Awaken Café, the much-loved Oakland coffee shop, sold Café Creator cards. Oakland residents purchased cards that entitled them to cafe products valued at more than the purchase price of the card. For example, a $1,000 card entitled the holder to $1,200 worth of purchases once the cafe opened. Like the membership option, this is the purchase of something of value and therefore not a security.
As entrepreneurs know, creativity can go a long way to make a business thrive. This is as true in the legal realm as in any other.
State and federal laws restrict your ability to secure capital. But with imagination, there are ways to do it without spending all your money on experts.
from East Bay Express
By Jenny Kassan
So you're trying to raise money for your business. But banks aren't lending, your savings are inadequate, and borrowing against the credit card isn't optimal. So you decide to raise money from your customers and put a sign in your window inviting people to invest in your business. Congratulations — you have just violated securities law and could face severe penalties.
Raising money from investors can be a great way to create or expand a business. Unlike lenders, investors typically forgo regular payments of interest and principal in exchange for the possibility of a bigger return down the road. But there is a huge barrier to raising capital from investors: securities law.
The regulations governing securities are little understood by most business owners. In my practice, I have seen small business owners who have no idea that their efforts to raise capital violate state and federal securities law.
It's helpful to recall why securities laws were passed. One big cause of the 1929 stock-market crash was the lack of regulation of securities markets. Any charlatan could print stock certificates promising huge returns to investors who had little recourse when the certificates turned out to be worthless. In response, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933. This act, along with state securities laws, is designed to protect unsophisticated investors from losing their life savings in speculative investments.
The basic requirement is that a security cannot be sold unless it is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and regulators in any state where investors reside. Registration requires extensive disclosures and compliance with numerous technical rules. This is what is commonly known as going public, a process that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal, accounting, and other fees and costs. There are some exceptions to the requirement, but even those can involve complicated compliance work and thousands of dollars in legal fees and other costs.
Many people assume that these requirements apply only when selling stock, but this is not the case. A security is any instrument such as a stock, bond, note, or contract that is purchased by someone who is expecting to receive profits generated by the efforts of others. Even if someone lends you money for your business and you promise an interest payment, that transaction can be covered by securities regulations. In fact, the rules apply not just to the sale but to the offering of a security, so even putting up a sign advertising a chance to invest in your business violates the law.
This is very frustrating, not only for business owners but also for people who would love to invest in their local economy. Because of these laws, even if I wanted to invest in a wonderful and hugely profitable business next door, I couldn't do it unless the business spent thousands of dollars for legal compliance. Unless I am a so-called "accredited investor," with a net worth of at least $1 million or a personal income exceeding $200,000, my only option is to invest in companies that have gone public. These companies are primarily giant multinational corporations whose practices I might not support and which contribute very little to my community.
So what is a small business owner to do? Here are some ways to raise funds that do not require extensive securities-compliance work.
Form a cooperative. In California, there is an exemption from securities regulations for investments of up to $300 by members of a cooperative. Cooperatives are businesses formed under a cooperative statute in which the members each have one vote. The members can be employees, customers, or business owners who join together to market their products or services. As long as the cooperative and all of its members are based in California, and the co-op transacts most of its business in California, it also is exempt from federal securities law.
Get donations. A security creates an expectation that the investor will receive a return. If someone gives you money with no expectation of a return, that is not a security and isn't subject to securities regulations. Many entrepreneurs are using so-called crowdfunding web sites such as ChipIn.com and MicroPledge.com to raise money for various causes. Donations of this type are not tax deductible, but lots of people might be willing to chip in to support a great local business.
Sell memberships. If someone gives you money in exchange for something of value, that is not considered a security. An interesting example of this strategy can be found at BeerBankroll.com. This crowdfunding platform is selling $50 memberships to open a brewpub. Membership confers a T-shirt, a chance to win prizes, and the opportunity to participate in a community-managed brewpub. If you can provide a membership package that people are willing to pay for, this can be a great way to raise money without selling securities.
Pre-sell a product. Awaken Café, the much-loved Oakland coffee shop, sold Café Creator cards. Oakland residents purchased cards that entitled them to cafe products valued at more than the purchase price of the card. For example, a $1,000 card entitled the holder to $1,200 worth of purchases once the cafe opened. Like the membership option, this is the purchase of something of value and therefore not a security.
As entrepreneurs know, creativity can go a long way to make a business thrive. This is as true in the legal realm as in any other.
A perfect storm for unemployment in June
by gjohnsit
from Daily Kos
Tue May 18, 2010
While there is plenty of talk about the economic recovery, there is barely a whisper about what is just a few weeks ahead. It's not any one thing. It's a combination of three (and possibly four) different events that will deliver devastating body-blows to the economy.
They are all being talked about, but no one that I've seen has put them all together.
That's where I come in, the doom-and-gloomer, with the news that no one wants to think about, but you are better off knowing now rather than later.
Losing the lifeline
It's been well-reported that unemployment benefits can last for 99 weeks (aka the 99'ers). What has been almost completely lacking in the news coverage is that June 2nd is the drop-dead date for unemployment extensions.
On April 12, 2010, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio attempted the impossible and "urged an extension on unemployment insurance". At that time, Senator Brown also stated, "Many of my colleagues had no problem giving tax breaks to companies that shipped jobs overseas, but now balk at extending unemployment insurance."
Currently there are four "Tiers" of extended unemployment insurance. If you were laid off early in the recession then you were eligible for the full 99 weeks. But let's say you were laid off in the spring of 2009 and you are on Tier Three of the emergency extended benefits that runs out in July.
If you are in that boat then you are sh*t out of luck. The only way you are eligible for Tier Four is if your benefits expire before the end of May.
This applies to all tiers. Thus if you were laid off only, say, 24 weeks ago, you aren't eligible for any federal unemployment benefits when the state UI expires after 26 weeks. Not even Tier One.
Currently the average duration on unemployment is 8 months. That's going to effect around 7 million people.
This means that literally millions of long-term unemployed are going to be losing their last lifeline in the coming months.
More than 400,000 jobless workers could run down their federal benefits each month over the next several months, even assuming that Congress continues to renew the expanded benefit period now in place.
There are some proposals for moving the deadline out for a few months, but nothing concrete at this time with only a week to go before the clock strikes midnight.
As for those who have actually used up the full 99 weeks of UI, there is almost no hope of a Tier Five being created.
The limits of stimulation
From the start of the year until about now, the Census will hire 1.2 million Americans. That's a lot of people getting jobs at the absolute best time. Unemployment is currently higher during a census period than at any time since 1940.
The problem is that it was never meant to be anything other than a temporary boost for employment, and that boost is coming to an end.
Since 1990 the largest month-over-month growth in Census workers was the 348,000 hired in May 2000 (225,000 were shed the following month).
The May unemployment numbers will probably look pretty good because of the Census, but starting in June those same people are going to be laid off by the hundreds of thousands every month.
Meanwhile, Obama's stimulus bill is over half spent and is scheduled to be drawn down by the end of September.
One of those stimulus items, the homebuyer tax credit, has recently expired. Early effects indicate the slight bounce in housing over the past year is over. Also the FHA is tightening up on closing cost assistance, and poor mortgage lenders.
States of Crisis
It's hard to miss all the talk of broke states, California in particular, almost all of whom will need to craft a new austerity budget in the next couple months. The current proposed California budget completely eliminates welfare, not just cutting it. That should give pause to those hundreds of thousands of people about to lose their UI.
To make matters worse, even after those draconian cuts, Schwarzenegger's proposed budget is still $7 billion short of balancing the budget, and lawmakers are in no mood to compromise. Thus we can expect to see another political standoff.
"California no longer has low-hanging fruit. In fact, we no longer have any medium-hanging fruit, nor any high-hanging fruit," Schwarzenegger said.
California is far from alone. The Arizona governor is warning of a "collapse" of the government. New York is running out of money. Illinois is handing out IOU's and says there are no good solutions.
Elimination of services are not the only things worth noting.
states will approach their June fiscal year-ends and, as a result of staggering budget gaps, soon announce austerity measures that by my estimates will cost between one million to two million jobs for state and local government workers over the next 12 months...
States will raise taxes, but higher taxes alone will not be enough to make up for the vast shortfall in state budgets. Accordingly, 42 states and the District of Columbia have already articulated plans to cut government jobs.
As many as 300,000 of the layoffs are expected to be school teachers.
On top of no federal unemployment extensions, we are looking at a million census workers being laid off, plus another million or two state workers, and this all happens in the next couple months.
Will the private sector be able to absorb this labor surplus? Not likely. Small business, the main drivers of the economy, have had their credit cut by Wall Street banks.
Small businesses continue to struggle to gain access to credit and cannot hire in this environment...
Small businesses fund themselves exactly the way consumers do, with credit cards and home equity lines. Over the past two years, more than $1.5 trillion in credit-card lines have been cut, and those cuts are increasing by the day. Due to dramatic declines in home values, home-equity lines as a funding option are effectively off the table.
The solution to this calamity is all too obvious.
The Ouzo Effect
The Greek Debt Crisis is causing havoc all over Europe. Bank lending is drying up and the currency is in freefall. In response, the governments of Europe are dramatically cutting back their spending.
How much of this will spill across the sea to America is uncertain, but you can't ignore the fact that Europe's economy is larger than America's. The shockwaves are already effecting China, where their stock market has dropped more than 20% and home sales dropping off a cliff.
If this crisis isn't contained very soon, it is likely that it will have a significant and negative impact on the American economy.
from Daily Kos
Tue May 18, 2010
While there is plenty of talk about the economic recovery, there is barely a whisper about what is just a few weeks ahead. It's not any one thing. It's a combination of three (and possibly four) different events that will deliver devastating body-blows to the economy.
They are all being talked about, but no one that I've seen has put them all together.
That's where I come in, the doom-and-gloomer, with the news that no one wants to think about, but you are better off knowing now rather than later.
Losing the lifeline
It's been well-reported that unemployment benefits can last for 99 weeks (aka the 99'ers). What has been almost completely lacking in the news coverage is that June 2nd is the drop-dead date for unemployment extensions.
On April 12, 2010, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio attempted the impossible and "urged an extension on unemployment insurance". At that time, Senator Brown also stated, "Many of my colleagues had no problem giving tax breaks to companies that shipped jobs overseas, but now balk at extending unemployment insurance."
Currently there are four "Tiers" of extended unemployment insurance. If you were laid off early in the recession then you were eligible for the full 99 weeks. But let's say you were laid off in the spring of 2009 and you are on Tier Three of the emergency extended benefits that runs out in July.
If you are in that boat then you are sh*t out of luck. The only way you are eligible for Tier Four is if your benefits expire before the end of May.
This applies to all tiers. Thus if you were laid off only, say, 24 weeks ago, you aren't eligible for any federal unemployment benefits when the state UI expires after 26 weeks. Not even Tier One.
Currently the average duration on unemployment is 8 months. That's going to effect around 7 million people.
This means that literally millions of long-term unemployed are going to be losing their last lifeline in the coming months.
More than 400,000 jobless workers could run down their federal benefits each month over the next several months, even assuming that Congress continues to renew the expanded benefit period now in place.
There are some proposals for moving the deadline out for a few months, but nothing concrete at this time with only a week to go before the clock strikes midnight.
As for those who have actually used up the full 99 weeks of UI, there is almost no hope of a Tier Five being created.
The limits of stimulation
From the start of the year until about now, the Census will hire 1.2 million Americans. That's a lot of people getting jobs at the absolute best time. Unemployment is currently higher during a census period than at any time since 1940.
The problem is that it was never meant to be anything other than a temporary boost for employment, and that boost is coming to an end.
Since 1990 the largest month-over-month growth in Census workers was the 348,000 hired in May 2000 (225,000 were shed the following month).
The May unemployment numbers will probably look pretty good because of the Census, but starting in June those same people are going to be laid off by the hundreds of thousands every month.
Meanwhile, Obama's stimulus bill is over half spent and is scheduled to be drawn down by the end of September.
One of those stimulus items, the homebuyer tax credit, has recently expired. Early effects indicate the slight bounce in housing over the past year is over. Also the FHA is tightening up on closing cost assistance, and poor mortgage lenders.
States of Crisis
It's hard to miss all the talk of broke states, California in particular, almost all of whom will need to craft a new austerity budget in the next couple months. The current proposed California budget completely eliminates welfare, not just cutting it. That should give pause to those hundreds of thousands of people about to lose their UI.
To make matters worse, even after those draconian cuts, Schwarzenegger's proposed budget is still $7 billion short of balancing the budget, and lawmakers are in no mood to compromise. Thus we can expect to see another political standoff.
"California no longer has low-hanging fruit. In fact, we no longer have any medium-hanging fruit, nor any high-hanging fruit," Schwarzenegger said.
California is far from alone. The Arizona governor is warning of a "collapse" of the government. New York is running out of money. Illinois is handing out IOU's and says there are no good solutions.
Elimination of services are not the only things worth noting.
states will approach their June fiscal year-ends and, as a result of staggering budget gaps, soon announce austerity measures that by my estimates will cost between one million to two million jobs for state and local government workers over the next 12 months...
States will raise taxes, but higher taxes alone will not be enough to make up for the vast shortfall in state budgets. Accordingly, 42 states and the District of Columbia have already articulated plans to cut government jobs.
As many as 300,000 of the layoffs are expected to be school teachers.
On top of no federal unemployment extensions, we are looking at a million census workers being laid off, plus another million or two state workers, and this all happens in the next couple months.
Will the private sector be able to absorb this labor surplus? Not likely. Small business, the main drivers of the economy, have had their credit cut by Wall Street banks.
Small businesses continue to struggle to gain access to credit and cannot hire in this environment...
Small businesses fund themselves exactly the way consumers do, with credit cards and home equity lines. Over the past two years, more than $1.5 trillion in credit-card lines have been cut, and those cuts are increasing by the day. Due to dramatic declines in home values, home-equity lines as a funding option are effectively off the table.
The solution to this calamity is all too obvious.
The Ouzo Effect
The Greek Debt Crisis is causing havoc all over Europe. Bank lending is drying up and the currency is in freefall. In response, the governments of Europe are dramatically cutting back their spending.
How much of this will spill across the sea to America is uncertain, but you can't ignore the fact that Europe's economy is larger than America's. The shockwaves are already effecting China, where their stock market has dropped more than 20% and home sales dropping off a cliff.
If this crisis isn't contained very soon, it is likely that it will have a significant and negative impact on the American economy.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
On 81st birthday, Oregon man gives company to employees
From the Seattle Times
February 18, 2010
By DANA TIMS
The Oregonian
MILWAUKIE,
Ore. — Scores of employees gathered to help Bob Moore celebrate his
81st birthday this week at the company that bears his name, Bob's Red
Mill Natural Foods.
Moore, whose mutual love of healthful eating and old-world
technologies spawned an internationally distributed line of products,
responded with a gift of his own — the whole company. The Employee
Stock Ownership Plan that Moore unveiled means that his 209 employees
now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground flours, cereals
and bread mixes.
"This is Bob taking care of us," said Lori Sobelson, who helps run
the business' retail operation. "He expects a lot out of us, but really
gives us the world in return."
Moore declined to say how much he thinks the company is worth. In
2004, however, one business publication estimated that year's revenue
at more than $24 million. A company news release issued this week
stated that Bob's Red Mill has chalked up an annual growth rate of
between 20 percent and 30 percent every year since.
"In some ways I had a choice," Moore said of what he could have done
with the company he founded with his wife, Charlee, in 1978. "But in my
heart, I didn't. These people are far too good at their jobs for me to
just sell it."
It's not that the offers aren't there. Hardly a day goes by that
Nancy Garner, Moore's executive assistant, doesn't field a call or
letter from someone wanting to buy the privately held company or take
it public.
"I had four messages waiting when I returned from a recent
vacation," she said. "Three of them were buyout offers." Garner said
she and other employees are floored by Moore's plan, under which any
worker with at least three years tenure is now fully vested.
"We're still learning all of the details," Garner said, "but it's
very humbling to be part of a company that cares this much about its
employees."
An employee stock-ownership plan, or ESOP, is a retirement plan in
which the company contributes its stock to the plan to be held in trust
for the benefit of its employees. The stock is never bought or held
directly.
Vested employees are sent annual reports detailing their respective
stakes in the company. When those employees quit or retire, they
receive in cash whatever amount they — and the company, through
increased revenues, new sales and controlled costs — are due.
"Eventual payouts could be substantial," said John Wagner, the
company's chief financial officer and, along with Moore, one of four
partners.
Moore said he began thinking about succession about nine years ago.
He'd heard about employee-stock-option programs and got much more
serious about the idea three years ago.
That Moore has now pulled off what few other company owners would
even dream about comes as no surprise to longtime acquaintances, such
as Glenn Dahl, owner of NatureBake bakery in Milwaukie.
"Bob's a force of nature," said Dahl, whose family's Gresham-area
bakery was Moore's first wholesale customer in the 1970s. "He's always
been that way. He gets an idea and just makes sure it happens, one way
or the other."
Moore's own background is in electrical and mechanical engineering,
but he fell in love with the mechanics of stone grinding in the 1960s
after reading about old stone-grinding flour mills.
At about the same time, Charlee began sharing with him her delvings
into the nutritional benefits of eating whole-grain foods. The couple
put their passions to work by starting, with their three sons, their
first milling operation in Redding, Calif.
In 1978, the couple moved to Portland to retire. Moore's idea at the
time, reflecting his long-held sense of spirituality, was to learn the
Bible in its original languages. A chance walk past a closed mill site
near Oregon City changed everything.
"I call it my emotional epiphany," Moore said. "Whatever excuse I care to give, I was just sucked into it like a vortex."
A 1988 arson destroyed the mill, when Moore was 60. Undeterred, he
rebuilt the operation, moved once because of space needs and now
occupies a 15-acre production facility and a two-acre headquarters and
retail outlet along Oregon 224 in Milwaukie.
Three production shifts, running six days a week, turn out a line of
goods distributed throughout North America, Asia and the Middle East.
The company earned an extra splash of international recognition when
a team traveled to Scotland and, apparently feeling its oats, won the
world's porridge-making championship.
Employees are just now grasping the meaning of Moore's birthday gift.
"It just shows how much faith and trust Bob has in us," said Bo
Thomas, the company's maintenance superintendent, who has put his four
children through college during his two decades there. "For all of us,
it's more than just a job. Obviously, it's the same way for Bob, too."
For Moore, meanwhile, nothing about the new arrangement will change
a thing. He plans to do for the foreseeable future what he has done
every day for decades.
"I may have given them the company," he said, chuckling, "but the boss part is still mine."
February 18, 2010
By DANA TIMS
The Oregonian
MILWAUKIE,
Ore. — Scores of employees gathered to help Bob Moore celebrate his
81st birthday this week at the company that bears his name, Bob's Red
Mill Natural Foods.
Moore, whose mutual love of healthful eating and old-world
technologies spawned an internationally distributed line of products,
responded with a gift of his own — the whole company. The Employee
Stock Ownership Plan that Moore unveiled means that his 209 employees
now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground flours, cereals
and bread mixes.
"This is Bob taking care of us," said Lori Sobelson, who helps run
the business' retail operation. "He expects a lot out of us, but really
gives us the world in return."
Moore declined to say how much he thinks the company is worth. In
2004, however, one business publication estimated that year's revenue
at more than $24 million. A company news release issued this week
stated that Bob's Red Mill has chalked up an annual growth rate of
between 20 percent and 30 percent every year since.
"In some ways I had a choice," Moore said of what he could have done
with the company he founded with his wife, Charlee, in 1978. "But in my
heart, I didn't. These people are far too good at their jobs for me to
just sell it."
It's not that the offers aren't there. Hardly a day goes by that
Nancy Garner, Moore's executive assistant, doesn't field a call or
letter from someone wanting to buy the privately held company or take
it public.
"I had four messages waiting when I returned from a recent
vacation," she said. "Three of them were buyout offers." Garner said
she and other employees are floored by Moore's plan, under which any
worker with at least three years tenure is now fully vested.
"We're still learning all of the details," Garner said, "but it's
very humbling to be part of a company that cares this much about its
employees."
An employee stock-ownership plan, or ESOP, is a retirement plan in
which the company contributes its stock to the plan to be held in trust
for the benefit of its employees. The stock is never bought or held
directly.
Vested employees are sent annual reports detailing their respective
stakes in the company. When those employees quit or retire, they
receive in cash whatever amount they — and the company, through
increased revenues, new sales and controlled costs — are due.
"Eventual payouts could be substantial," said John Wagner, the
company's chief financial officer and, along with Moore, one of four
partners.
Moore said he began thinking about succession about nine years ago.
He'd heard about employee-stock-option programs and got much more
serious about the idea three years ago.
That Moore has now pulled off what few other company owners would
even dream about comes as no surprise to longtime acquaintances, such
as Glenn Dahl, owner of NatureBake bakery in Milwaukie.
"Bob's a force of nature," said Dahl, whose family's Gresham-area
bakery was Moore's first wholesale customer in the 1970s. "He's always
been that way. He gets an idea and just makes sure it happens, one way
or the other."
Moore's own background is in electrical and mechanical engineering,
but he fell in love with the mechanics of stone grinding in the 1960s
after reading about old stone-grinding flour mills.
At about the same time, Charlee began sharing with him her delvings
into the nutritional benefits of eating whole-grain foods. The couple
put their passions to work by starting, with their three sons, their
first milling operation in Redding, Calif.
In 1978, the couple moved to Portland to retire. Moore's idea at the
time, reflecting his long-held sense of spirituality, was to learn the
Bible in its original languages. A chance walk past a closed mill site
near Oregon City changed everything.
"I call it my emotional epiphany," Moore said. "Whatever excuse I care to give, I was just sucked into it like a vortex."
A 1988 arson destroyed the mill, when Moore was 60. Undeterred, he
rebuilt the operation, moved once because of space needs and now
occupies a 15-acre production facility and a two-acre headquarters and
retail outlet along Oregon 224 in Milwaukie.
Three production shifts, running six days a week, turn out a line of
goods distributed throughout North America, Asia and the Middle East.
The company earned an extra splash of international recognition when
a team traveled to Scotland and, apparently feeling its oats, won the
world's porridge-making championship.
Employees are just now grasping the meaning of Moore's birthday gift.
"It just shows how much faith and trust Bob has in us," said Bo
Thomas, the company's maintenance superintendent, who has put his four
children through college during his two decades there. "For all of us,
it's more than just a job. Obviously, it's the same way for Bob, too."
For Moore, meanwhile, nothing about the new arrangement will change
a thing. He plans to do for the foreseeable future what he has done
every day for decades.
"I may have given them the company," he said, chuckling, "but the boss part is still mine."
Draft Proposal for Local Food Currency
(This just a first rough draft of what a local food currency could look like)
Purpose: To support sustainable local food production, distribution, and awareness. To make healthy food more accessible, especially to low income populations. To begin the implementation of a Bay Area wide currency system.
Governance: Representatives from different nonprofit and for profit entities that are part of the currency system, as well as representatives from the communities using the currency. Positions would have term limits.
Mechanism: Paper scrip, mutual credit online accounts, eventually card. Will likely expand to other kinds of local businesses after initial implementation is successful.
Backing: Redemption for local food. Labor on local food projects, related businesses and nonprofits. There would be either be no conversion back to dollars or a penalty for conversion (prefer the former). The money sitting in the bank would be available for loans or grants to urban agriculture projects (urban CSAs, community gardens, rooftop gardens, urban farms, school gardens, coop grocery store start ups, farmers market start ups) in combination with food currency loans/grants, thereby converting value from $USD to real value in community – sustainable food security.
Issuance: Purchase at a "buy local" discount or as change at certain businesses or nonprofits that are local and involved with food and ag - gardening classes and stores, restaurants, farmers markets, for CSA shares, underground farmers market, grocery stores and small producers. Offer memberships where you get even more of a discount on the scrip as a perk for the membership fee. Earn the scrip through working at approved local food related projects like Hayes Valley Farm or a food bank. This creates opportunities for more abundance of food flowing to those that need it most - those that don't have $USD. Workers at a local business that produces/distributes local food (farm, farmers markets, restaurants, grocers, CSAs) can earn scrip as a bonus. People could also earn scrip by gleaning or by growing food in an open lot or other location, such as backyard, and turning the produce in for distribution in exchange for scrip. Grants and loans may be made to sustainable food security projects. The Timebank could form a parallel online accounting system for this project where timebank members could choose that their volunteer hours go to a food currency account (which would be taxable) and then could draw down on positive accounts to issue scrip. Or if we have scrip denominated in dollars, we could form a separate mutual credit accounting system.
Circulation: People/entities would earn or buy or receive as change the currency and then spend at businesses, nonprofits, markets and independent producers related to sustainable, local food. We would encourage member organizations to encourage their suppliers to join the system and integrate the supply chain, thereby creating a currency loop that keeps the money flowing. Loans made in food currency would need to be paid back in food currency thereby creating pressure for borrowers to find ways to both spend and earn back their currency. Businesses that have log jams of currency would be helped to find ways to spend to support their business, to make nonprofit donations of currencies (community grants) for which they would receive public acknowledgment, or to provide bonuses to their employees.
Participants: Unemployed, underemployed, elderly, differently-abled, youth, anyone! Food-related nonprofits, grocery stores and restaurants that source some sustainable local food, farmers markets, underground markets, urban farms, educational institutions that teach about food/agriculture, food banks, municipal food projects. Likely partners: Noe Valley Farmers Market, Underground Farmers Market, Rainbow Grocery, Far West Fungi, Hayes Valley Farm, Alemany Farm, Free Farm/Produce to the People, Little City Urban Gardens CSA, Heart of the City Farmers Market, Mission Pie, Forage SF, Café Gratitude/Gracias Madre, Garden for the Environment, Urban Permaculture Institute, Valencia Whole Foods, Veritable Vegetable, Arizmendi, Alemany Farmers Market, San Francisco Food Bank, St. Vincent De Paul and lots more.
Funding: Sales of scrip for $USD, grants related to local urban agriculture, food security and local economics.
Purpose: To support sustainable local food production, distribution, and awareness. To make healthy food more accessible, especially to low income populations. To begin the implementation of a Bay Area wide currency system.
Governance: Representatives from different nonprofit and for profit entities that are part of the currency system, as well as representatives from the communities using the currency. Positions would have term limits.
Mechanism: Paper scrip, mutual credit online accounts, eventually card. Will likely expand to other kinds of local businesses after initial implementation is successful.
Backing: Redemption for local food. Labor on local food projects, related businesses and nonprofits. There would be either be no conversion back to dollars or a penalty for conversion (prefer the former). The money sitting in the bank would be available for loans or grants to urban agriculture projects (urban CSAs, community gardens, rooftop gardens, urban farms, school gardens, coop grocery store start ups, farmers market start ups) in combination with food currency loans/grants, thereby converting value from $USD to real value in community – sustainable food security.
Issuance: Purchase at a "buy local" discount or as change at certain businesses or nonprofits that are local and involved with food and ag - gardening classes and stores, restaurants, farmers markets, for CSA shares, underground farmers market, grocery stores and small producers. Offer memberships where you get even more of a discount on the scrip as a perk for the membership fee. Earn the scrip through working at approved local food related projects like Hayes Valley Farm or a food bank. This creates opportunities for more abundance of food flowing to those that need it most - those that don't have $USD. Workers at a local business that produces/distributes local food (farm, farmers markets, restaurants, grocers, CSAs) can earn scrip as a bonus. People could also earn scrip by gleaning or by growing food in an open lot or other location, such as backyard, and turning the produce in for distribution in exchange for scrip. Grants and loans may be made to sustainable food security projects. The Timebank could form a parallel online accounting system for this project where timebank members could choose that their volunteer hours go to a food currency account (which would be taxable) and then could draw down on positive accounts to issue scrip. Or if we have scrip denominated in dollars, we could form a separate mutual credit accounting system.
Circulation: People/entities would earn or buy or receive as change the currency and then spend at businesses, nonprofits, markets and independent producers related to sustainable, local food. We would encourage member organizations to encourage their suppliers to join the system and integrate the supply chain, thereby creating a currency loop that keeps the money flowing. Loans made in food currency would need to be paid back in food currency thereby creating pressure for borrowers to find ways to both spend and earn back their currency. Businesses that have log jams of currency would be helped to find ways to spend to support their business, to make nonprofit donations of currencies (community grants) for which they would receive public acknowledgment, or to provide bonuses to their employees.
Participants: Unemployed, underemployed, elderly, differently-abled, youth, anyone! Food-related nonprofits, grocery stores and restaurants that source some sustainable local food, farmers markets, underground markets, urban farms, educational institutions that teach about food/agriculture, food banks, municipal food projects. Likely partners: Noe Valley Farmers Market, Underground Farmers Market, Rainbow Grocery, Far West Fungi, Hayes Valley Farm, Alemany Farm, Free Farm/Produce to the People, Little City Urban Gardens CSA, Heart of the City Farmers Market, Mission Pie, Forage SF, Café Gratitude/Gracias Madre, Garden for the Environment, Urban Permaculture Institute, Valencia Whole Foods, Veritable Vegetable, Arizmendi, Alemany Farmers Market, San Francisco Food Bank, St. Vincent De Paul and lots more.
Funding: Sales of scrip for $USD, grants related to local urban agriculture, food security and local economics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)